Panel Directs New Scrutiny Of Intelligence Aimed at Iran

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: February 6, 2005

The Senate Intelligence Committee is directing new critical attention at American intelligence on Iran and other hot spots, as part of an attempt to pre-empt any recurrence of the problems that marred prewar reporting on Iraq, Congressional officials said Saturday.

The officials said the effort would include scrutiny of sources being used by intelligence agencies as the basis for their conclusions about Iran, including whether it is trying to develop nuclear arms. The Central Intelligence Agency believes that Iran may be within one to three years of having all the ingredients necessary to make a nuclear bomb.

In a report last summer, the Senate committee was scathing in its conclusions about American intelligence on Iraq, saying that prewar assertions that Baghdad possessed chemical and biological weapons had not been supported by information available at the time. The Congressional officials said the effort now under way reflected some skepticism about intelligence on Iran.

Both Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the panel, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the panel's top Democrat, have approved the new approach, the officials said. They described the scrutiny as part of an attempt to focus the committee's oversight efforts on high-priority threats, including terrorism, weapons proliferation and North Korea, as well as Iran.

The effort was reported Saturday by The Los Angeles Times. The newspaper quoted Mr. Roberts as having said in an interview that ''we have to be more pre-emptive on this committee to try to look ahead and determine our capabilities so that you don't get stuck with a situation like you did with Iraq.''

In recent interviews, current and former intelligence officials have acknowledged that American knowledge of Iran is limited, despite the fact that the C.I.A. and other agencies have devoted an immense amount of resources to learning about the country in the quarter-century since a pro-American government there was toppled.

Aides to Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rockefeller said Saturday that it would be inaccurate to characterize the oversight effort as a formal review. In a statement relayed by a spokeswoman, Mr. Rockefeller said: ''One of the lessons we learned from Iraq was not to take all information at face value and to ask more questions in the beginning rather than in the end. Now is the time for us to be looking at the quality of the information we are getting and making sure that we have enough resources, and the right resources, focused on the problem.'' The statement also said, ''We can't make the same mistakes we made before.''

The committee effort appears to run parallel with a formal inquiry being carried out by a presidential commission that is due to report by the end of March on the state of intelligence about the proliferation of illicit weapons. That inquiry, led by Laurence H. Silberman, a federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator and governor from Virginia, has been carried out in private but is believed to focus on case studies including Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Libya.

In his State of the Union address on Wednesday, President Bush described Iran as ''the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve.'' Iran has said that its nuclear program is intended entirely for civilian use, but American intelligence agencies have said that it is vigorously pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Congressional officials said the Senate panel would seek to identify any weaknesses in American intelligence on Iran so that any gaps could be filled. The officials declined to speak for the record, saying that they did not want to overshadow the comments made by Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rockefeller.